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Comment by JKCalhoun | Hacker News Reader

I love my medium format film cameras. I think everyone interested in photography should try it. Yashicas (just as an example of a company that made good medium format film cameras) are surprisingly affordable on eBay. I've had good luck buying from Japan, FWIW.

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I'll throw Mamiya 645 in there for a good medium format camera as well. Yashica is great, I own a Yashica Electro 35 and it is awesome no thought rangefinder.

With the tariffs this is no longer possible for US persons.

Do the tariffs apply on used items as well? In any case such cameras are fairly cheap nowadays

They use to fall under de-minimus? But no longer. So there are duties to pay.

Huh?

Tariffs shouldn’t prevent buying stuff, you just have to, y’know, pay a tariff on import.

In this case, a Japanese made camera will incur a 15% tariff.

Most countries, including Japan, India, Canada, and nearly the entire EU, have completely stopped shipping packages to US consumers. This is not because of the tariffs themselves, but because the US apparently has no system in place for actually handling the tariffs on goods that previously qualified for the de minimis exemption. Two months and counting with no information on when shipping might resume.

Some merchants in those countries have stopped. There isn’t a general stoppage of everything.

I just checked and you can still send goods between Japan and the US. There are still merchants selling the exact mentioned camera on eBay that will ship to the US.

Here is the exact camera mentioned, offered by a Japanese seller, that will ship to the United States: https://www.ebay.com/itm/317445808304

Can you source your claim that absolutely no courier is capable of shipping goods into the US? I can’t find anything using google, or on any courier websites.

FedEx does have information about how to correctly fill out the forms for the purposes of tariffs, but does not mention that they will not accept shipments.

I see, that was my mistake then. I was unaware that services like FedEx were still accepting packages. My personal experience was that I have been unable to ship to the US for months because the carrier I use stopped accepting packages, and was under the impression they all had given the number of countries for which this was true and the news coverage I had seen. I wonder why so many countries' postal services have stopped while some couriers like FedEx continue to operate.

There were some temporary stops, but mostly they resolved pretty quickly. I think an issue is that the US requested that tariffs be paid upfront at the sending end and a some couriers aren’t set up for that. Or that they needed time to set it up.

Many of the postal and courier systems that suspended service have since set up the systems they need, and are happily moving packages into the US, but it tends not to make the news.

Talk to the seller. I just ordered a used light meter from Japan. Shipper just wants the duties paid up-front.

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